The Easel

13th July 2021

William Gedney’s Timelessly Intimate Photographs of San Francisco in the 1960s

Rebecca Bengal | Aperture | 29th June 2021

Gedney didn’t lack for recognition in his day – prestigious fellowships, a solo show at New York’s MoMA, admiring friends – yet his photography is now little known. Perhaps a lack of self-promotion explains why he didn’t publish any of the photo books he had put together. Now they are being published, what do they show? “Many of his photos are a hymn to an age he knows to be transient, full of ambiguities, freighted with a fascinating immaturity”.

Photo story

Richard B Woodward | The New Criterion | 15th June 2021

An archive piece. Having been given a camera as a child, Eugene Smith was “famous at twenty and a legend at forty”. Inspired by a crusading humanism, he used “Rembrandt lighting” to take some of the century’s most famous images.  His photo-essays were even more highly acclaimed. In contrast to his heroic reputation, Smith was in reality a loner, an obsessive perfectionist, almost impossible to work with. Said a contemporary “he’s crazy, but he’s great.”

10 things to know about Milton Avery

Staff | Christie’s | 17th May 2021

Avery was far too good an artist to be forgotten but not good enough to be great. He adored Matisse and was adored in turn by Rothko who found inspiration in Avery’s exquisite sense of colour. Though he helped inspire colour field paintings in the 1960’s, Avery was committed to figuration. And his figures are just not that communicative – “ideograms” says one critic. Once abstraction took off, it made his representational work look old hat. He was eclipsed.

6th July 2021

Paul Cadmus and the Censorship of Queer Art

Bryan Martin | Perspectives | 25th June 2021

Art has long been a carrier of coded messages. Employed to capture “the American scene”, Cadmus painted The Fleet’s In in 1934. It’s satirical image of drunk, flirtatious sailors with sexualized bodies caused a scandal. Homoeroticism, a clear element of the painting, went unmentioned, presumably because homosexuality was a topic absent from mainstream discourse. The Navy protested it was “not true to the Navy”. Well, not all the Navy.

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